# T3DNet: Compressing Point Cloud Models for Lightweight 3D Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.19264 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19264/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 40 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 40)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.02531/) (2015)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ScanNet: Richly-annotated 3D Reconstructions of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.04405/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [Deep Compression: Compressing Deep Neural Networks with Pruning, Trained Quantization and Huffman Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1510.00149/) (2015)
- [FitNets: Hints for Thin Deep Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6550/) (2014)
- [Pruning Filters for Efficient ConvNets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08710/) (2016)
- [PV-RCNN: Point-Voxel Feature Set Abstraction for 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13192/) (2019)
- [XNOR-Net: ImageNet Classification Using Binary Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.05279/) (2016)
- [Once-for-All: Train One Network and Specialize it for Efficient Deployment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09791/) (2019)
- [Multi-View 3D Object Detection Network for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07759/) (2016)
- [Deep Mutual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.00384/) (2017)
- [Network In Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.4400/) (2013)
- [BinaryConnect: Training Deep Neural Networks with binary weights during propagations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.00363/) (2015)
- [Learning Structured Sparsity in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03665/) (2016)
- [Revisiting Point Cloud Classification: A New Benchmark Dataset and Classification Model on Real-World Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.04616/) (2019)
- [Do Deep Nets Really Need to be Deep?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6184/) (2013)
- [ThiNet: A Filter Level Pruning Method for Deep Neural Network Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06342/) (2017)
- [Searching Efficient 3D Architectures with Sparse Point-Voxel Convolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.16100/) (2020)
- [Single Path One-Shot Neural Architecture Search with Uniform Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00420/) (2019)
- [Point Transformer V2: Grouped Vector Attention and Partition-based Pooling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05666/) (2022)
- [Rethinking Network Design and Local Geometry in Point Cloud: A Simple Residual MLP Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07123/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning with Limited Numerical Precision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.02551/) (2015)
- [Relation-Shape Convolutional Neural Network for Point Cloud Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07601/) (2019)
- [OctNet: Learning Deep 3D Representations at High Resolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.05009/) (2016)
- [MCUNet: Tiny Deep Learning on IoT Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.10319/) (2020)
- [Submanifold Sparse Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.01307/) (2017)
- [Quantized Convolutional Neural Networks for Mobile Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.06473/) (2015)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [ContrastAlign: Toward Robust BEV Feature Alignment via Contrastive Learning for Multi-Modal 3D Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.16873/) (2024)
- [UniGS: Unified Language-Image-3D Pretraining with Gaussian Splatting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17860/) (2025)
- [H3DNAS: Hardware-Aware ONNX-Native 3D Point Cloud Model Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.02684/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

3D point cloud has been widely used in many mobile application scenarios, including autonomous driving and 3D sensing on mobile devices. However, existing 3D point cloud models tend to be large and cumbersome, making them hard to deploy on edged devices due to their high memory requirements and non-real-time latency. There has been a lack of research on how to compress 3D point cloud models into lightweight models. In this paper, we propose a method called T3DNet (Tiny 3D Network with augmEntation and disTillation) to address this issue. We find that the tiny model after network augmentation is much easier for a teacher to distill. Instead of gradually reducing the parameters through techniques such as pruning or quantization, we pre-define a tiny model and improve its performance through auxiliary supervision from augmented networks and the original model. We evaluate our method on several public datasets, including ModelNet40, ShapeNet, and ScanObjectNN. Our method can achieve high compression rates without significant accuracy sacrifice, achieving state-of-the-art performances on three datasets against existing methods. Amazingly, our T3DNet is 58 times smaller and 54 times faster than the original model yet with only 1.4% accuracy descent on the ModelNet40 dataset.